TerrAvion (YC W14) Launches Aerial Imagery As A Service For Farmers
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Are there any drone platforms with >1 hr flight time and >1 mile range available for non-defense use?
By the way, the TechCrunch article mentions a per-pass price for other services, but doesn't clarify whether Terravion's price is per-pass, so it actually makes it sound like you are more expensive by comparison.
However, they're still quite expensive and not really cheaper to operate than a Cessna, and then there are the legal issues. I personally think that once of the things that will drive the cost of drones down quite a bit will be when an autopilot maker comes out with a way to retrofit Cessnas and other proven, GA airframes into OPVs (optionally piloted vehicles).
Indeed!
Random example: http://www.uavfactory.com/product/46
Although you'll need to budget an additional ~$20k depending on autopilot system.
Give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish
We intend to move to drones whenever they are legal, cheaper and more effective, but in the meantime Cessnas are the answer.
We have client in Livermore, CA who is actually a lawyer but has a 5 acre vineyard at his house. For $150 he can't even afford to do the research on Amazon to pick the right drone with the right sensor, let alone buy it, and operate it.
He is right next to another client, a large integrated grower with a couple thousand acres. No matter what sized drone they picked, if they were going to do a high-revisit service internally, they would have to hire someone full time to run it. We deliver to them for far less than the price of a new employee, let alone all the IT they would have to invest in.
My knowledge from local farmers is that they already pay for experts who amalgamate a variety of data sources (soil testing, aerial, satellite, etc) to assess & treat their crops. I mean, does a farmer even know what is NDVI or how to interpret it?
Or will you kill this thread too because it is about a YC company?
If you have showdead set to off, this is in reference to:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7179063
It is a super lame move to try to hijack a thread about a newly launched startup to get attention for some unrelated grievance. You wouldn't like if it someone did that to you.
Perhaps an effort to make the (manual AND automatic) moderation processes more transparent would go a long way towards avoiding this situation where people feel they're fighting with a faceless machine and so get upset.
There are far too many situations where posts go up and down as if by magic, and no one can figure out why. How would you feel if someone did that to you?
As for hijacking this thread, there was another thread that was perfectly suited for the purpose, you killed it, besides you've removed my ability to post so I had this left as a means of last resort. Think of it as a hack, this is 'hacker news' after all, isn't it?
HN seem to have a lot of targeted moderation "features" these days. Years ago I seem to have lost my ability to flag articles, which as far as I can tell comes from flagging things that the mods don't think should be flagged.
As for the original killed threads, I can't see what makes the Ask HN post different from a blog post with the same content that's been submitted. The guidelines say to not post what could have been emailed, but the poster was asking the HN community for advice and not asking the startup anything, so the post was not killed strictly per HN guidelines.
My 2¢ is that moderation is damaging the community more than submissions and comments.
Not really. Or rather, the question of whether or not it was trolling is the subject of [current] debate. (It depends on whether it was off-topic or not--clearly 'pg thinks it was, and some people think that since he is the owner/creator/BDFL he is right, but lots of other intelligent people disagree, which is the whole reason this thread exists. I'm not really sure it matters, but calling 'jaquesm a troll is pretty strong.)
jacques, do you know off a forum off of HN where this is being discussed? There's nothing left on HN besides your comment.
One good thing that came out of it is that the CEO is now aware of it (as per his comment in the thread) and hopefully he'll get to the bottom of that particular customers issues.
So if my assumption is correct then we can look forward to a post by the same OP relating how he got excellent support in a couple of days, or maybe he'll sue them after all.